Flying insects, for example, various social wasps, including paper wasps, hornets, and yellow jackets, can be a significant nuisance and a potential hazard to people and animals engaged in outdoor activities. Such flying insects can be prevalent in rural settings and even in very well-developed residential areas. Various species of insects, flying and otherwise, are also common in agricultural settings and in other commercial processing venues, including, for example, meat packing factories, food processing facilities, and livestock ranches.
Traps for flying insects are known in the art and often have been quite successful at trapping target insects. For example, the inventor of the insect trap disclosed herein pioneered conical element hanging traps, such as the wasp traps described and claimed in U.S. Pat. No. 4,551,941, which issued on Nov. 12, 1985, to Schneidmiller, and which is hereby incorporated by reference in its entirety. Schneidmiller discloses a transparent cylindrical insect trap that is selective to entrapping wasps. A “wasp” is a generic name applied to insects of the order Hymenoptera, which includes particularly paper wasps, hornets, and yellow jackets. The present inventor also discloses certain improvements to the insect trap in U.S. Pat. No. 5,557,880, which issued on Sep. 24, 1996, to Schneidmiller, also incorporated herein by reference in its entirety.
Previously patented trap structures include a transparent, generally cylindrical entrapment chamber that is open at the bottom, and a base that attaches to the bottom of the entrapment chamber and defines one or more entryways for the target insect. In the prior art device, the entrapment chamber also includes ventilation openings at the top end of the cylindrical entrapment chamber. The entryways in the base are apertures that permit and encourage wasps to enter the entrapment chamber. An entry cone shaped as a truncated cone or tapered guide is disposed in the entrapment chamber. The tapered guide is open at the bottom end, which is directly adjacent to the perimeter at the bottom of the entrapment chamber, and includes a smaller open aperture at the top end. Wasps or other target insects enter the trap through the entryways, and fly or climb into the cone, passing through the smaller aperture in its truncated upper end. The target insect thereby becomes entrapped in the cylindrical chamber. Once the target insect is inside the chamber, exiting is highly improbable.
Insect traps may use one or more attractants to lure target insects into the trap. The attractant may be as simple as water, or may be a chemical attractant that is targeted to a particular species. For example, the attractant may be an olfactory attractant for the target insect. The attractant may combine water with a volatile olfactory attractant, wherein the volatile olfactory attractant mixes with vapors from a chemical attractant and/or water in a separate container, the mixed vapors exiting the trap in a plume. An effective attractant plume will attract the target insects toward the trap, and in particular toward the trap entryway. Various attractants or combination of attractants may be used, including both solid and liquid attractants, providing great flexibility in selecting from a range and combination of attractants.
Portions of the trap may be colored and/or reflective to visually attract one or more target insects. Any such coloring may be selected to entice or attract a particular species of insect, providing a high degree of selectivity to the trap.
However, it is known that certain species of insects are territorial, and/or do not co-mingle. Members of a territorial insect species may be mutually or unilaterally antagonistic and/or repulsive toward other insect species. Sometimes mutually antagonistic species share a common environment (such as a residential yard, an orchard, a field, a wooded area, or the like) but avoid or repel each other when they come into close proximity. In such cases, conventional insect traps may be ineffective for one or more desired target species due to the close-proximity repulsion between target species.
It is also known that an attractant to one species of insect may be a repellant or inhibitory to another species, in some cases even when the species are relatively closely related, e.g., in the same family. Therefore, combining different attractants in order to target more than one species of insect may be ineffective or have significantly reduced efficacy because one target species may be repelled by an attractant targeted to different species.
However, it is inconvenient, costly, and/or unsightly to set out multiple traps (or multiple sets of traps) wherein different traps target different species of insects. Maintenance of a large multiplicity of traps, for example, emptying and replacing attractant, is also inconvenient and costly. There remains a need, therefore, for improvements in insect traps that are suitable for entrapping more than one species of insect.